Online Marketing-Website Traffic Patterns

A recent study of website traffic from 15k websites shows interesting traffic patterns. At first glance it seems it shows the obvious, that most of the traffic comes from Direct and Organic sources. We all know how important a role content plays in increasing traffic for your site, so this is a no brainer. The more relevant content you have the more traffic your site should attract.

What is not so obvious is the all the other sources of traffic together contribute about 10%-30% of your website’s traffic. Depending on your industry and specific products this can vary significantly but for most companies that we deal with in the manufacturing sector the biggest contributors to traffic are Organic and Direct.

Take the case of Email marketing. Email is a common type of marketing that many manufacturers use to reach out to their potential customers. Email marketing has gotten quite sophisticated in recent years and there are all sorts of analytics that one can monitor to measure the performance of an email campaign. However as the study shows email marketing often results in no more than a 3-5% of website traffic. What we suggest to our clients is to use their resources wisely when it comes to email marketing. Create campaigns that are meant to achieve specific goals.

Social marketing continuously is gaining ground among B2B companies especially as the younger generation of college graduates transition into the work world. These new generation of workers will likely rely on social marketing to reach out to their customer, prospects, and communicate with peers and friends.

The good news for B2B manufacturers is that there are more communication channels available to reach out to potential customers globally. But at the same time the technical skills needed to plan and execute integrated marketing programs is becoming more advanced. The explosion of internet communication channels has created subject matter experts in each category of internet marketing including email, social, organic, and paid search. What this means is that without an overall marketing strategy manufacturing companies often find themselves at the mercy of individual subject matter experts that may not understand the client’s overall business.

This leads to the question of how does a company determine the best online marketing strategy to follow. The answer often is “it depends on your business and what you want to accomplish…..”.